Diaz, until last month the relentless communications director for the Republican National Committee and reliable source of jabs at Democrats, now sends out a new “Morning Roundup” of attacks on the Employee Free Choice Act.

With Democrats running the show, EFCA, union-backed legislation that would make it easier for unions to organize workers, has become the scourge of the business community. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce calls it “potentially disastrous,” and a top official there, Randel Johnson, describes the battle over it as “Armageddon.”

Both business and labor are dispatching hordes of supporters to lobby Congress this week. And already, the battle has provided a welcome stimulus to a seriously depressed industry: Republican political operatives.

“There are groups springing up almost every week,” said Rhonda Betz of Navigators Global, a consulting firm that started the first anti-EFCA group out of the gate, Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, in 2006. “Some of it is a reflection of them identifying this as a fundraising opportunity, and some of it is a reflection of real stuff going on.”

Fighting the bill “employs a whole lot of people in town,” conceded another anti-EFCA official. “Only lobbyists could cook something up like this.”

“Card check,” as its opponents term the bill, is a conservative hot button like abortion or the Fairness Doctrine, only more lucrative. Both sides agree on the stakes — increased union membership and higher wages — and the titans of industry are scared enough to spend tens of millions of dollars opposing it.

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One key provision would lower the bar for unionization, triggering union representation when half the workers in a workplace sign cards indicating their support, rather than measuring that support in a single vote. Another would lock employers into binding, federally mediated arbitration if a contract agreement doesn’t come swiftly.

“People see this as a huge power shift in labor-management relations,” said Steven Law, a chief of staff for the Department of Labor under President George W. Bush who runs the chamber’s Workforce Freedom Initiative, which expects to spend $20 million fighting EFCA this year. “This is a complete and radical rewriting of labor laws to effectively remove any employer control over the workplace and put it in the hands of the unions.”

Among those fighting the legislation are Navigators’ Mike Murphy and pollster John McLaughlin, whose Coalition for a Democratic Workplace has spent between $6.5 million and $10 million since 2007, Bentz said. The coalition was founded by hundreds of trade groups, ranging from one representing the retail giant Wal-Mart (which another Republican consultant said is heavily invested in the fight) to many smaller ones, and is also organizing local battles against the bill around the country.

The deep-pocketed Chamber of Commerce — which represents the CEOs of giants like IBM, Pepsi, and UPS — and the National Federation of Independent Business are both fighting the legislation.

Lobbyist Rick Berman runs the Employee Freedom Action Committee, which has begun airing ads opposing EFCA. Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions just hired former Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis to run its Save American Jobs Project.

A spinoff of Americans for Tax Reform, the Alliance for Worker Freedom, and a group called SOSBallots, led by former Rep. Earnest Istook and with its own consultants in Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas, are keeping up the pressure at the state level.

And the Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs, which is chaired by an association of human resources executives, has employed such academic luminaries as University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein to make the case against the legislation.

“I haven’t seen anything on this scale since 1978,” said Berman, recalling the battle over a labor-backed effort to amend the National Labor Relations Act to ease union organizing, which failed after a record-breaking seven cloture votes.

Berman, a veteran corporate lobbyist, said the backers of his group are “uniquely anonymous.” Huffington Post reported in January that Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus urged other tycoons on a conference call to back Berman in an effort to forestall “the decline of a civilization.”

The ECFA campaign began in earnest in 2005, when Murphy and McLaughlin began polling aspects of the bill and settled on the worker sign-up provision as the most vulnerable.

“We developed a framing that it was really a privacy issue,” said Murphy, describing what became a campaign against taking away a “secret ballot” for workers, a change that both sides believe would weaken employer anti-union campaigns.

And most observers on both sides agree that business groups won the first round by defining the conflict in those terms.

“All of those efforts, the chamber’s as well as other groups, probably caught labor flat-footed on it,” said Law.

While most of the employer groups have made the “card check” (the unions call it “majority sign-up”) their main target, some worry that labor may back business into a deal by giving up that provision but keeping one requiring binding arbitration — which business leaders view as equally damaging.

There has also been intramural sniping on the question of exactly how to portray their union foes.

“Just trashing union leaders — which appeals to certain donors and is emotionally satisfying and a successful fundraising tool for some of those groups — is not the way to win this thing. It’s a huge mistake,” said Murphy, in an apparent shot at Berman’s group, which is a spinoff of his unapologetically anti-labor Center for Union Facts. “Some find it easier to do stuff that appeals to donors because they profit from the money they raise,” Murphy said.

Berman, in turn, said polls show that only when people “appreciate the downside of unionization”—like mandatory dues, denial of merit-based promotion and labor corruption—will they understand the need to oppose EFCA. “Not everyone is comfortable with the broader educational themes,” he said of rival anti-EFCA groups.

Others have questioned whether million of dollars for Washington consultants and lobbyists is money well spent.

“That’s a waste of money. What would a consultant do for you?” asked Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, whose Alliance is focused on state campaigns. “Go into their districts. Run out there. Fund a candidate.”

Meanwhile, unions are expected to spend heavily on the bill as well. SEIU alone has a $50 million push planned for a package of issues that includes the Employee Free Choice act. Corporate officials insist they’ll be wildly outspent.

Union leaders, though, say it’s their spending that will be eclipsed.

“We aren’t releasing the details of what our budget is going to be, but whatever it is we know it’s going to be dwarfed by corporate cash,” said AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale.

Labor’s campaign has also been hobbled by internal strife, with one large-scale effort by elements of UNITE HERE becoming a hostage to that union’s civil war.

Still, labor leaders profess confidence that with recent, explicit support from President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden and backing in the Senate hovering near the magic number of 60, they will pass the bill this year.

“If you’re an out of work Republican operative, there’s a place for you – and maybe an Xbox from Newt Gingrich – working to make the case that CEOs shouldn’t have to give workers a level playing field,” sniped SEIU President Andy Stern in an email, referring to a recent giveaway of Wii video terminal as part of an anti-EFCA campaign at the American Conservative Union’s annual conference last week. “They spent millions trying to defeat workers’ freedom to form a union before the election, and now they are throwing every body they have left at it – and it’s still not working.”